I thought she could reignite my prelapsarian self. It was about two-thirty in the morning by then. Her husband answered the phone, then passed the receiver to her. “Hello?” she asked. “Hi,” I said, and paused. “Has something happened?” she asked. It was immediately clear that I could not explain what had happened. I had nothing to say. My other line went; it was someone who had been at the movie with me, calling because he thought he had accidentally given me his key along with the change from our sodas. I checked my pocket and his key was there. “I’ve got to go,” I said to my old friend, and got off the line. That night, I climbed up to the roof and realized as the sun came up that I was feeling absurdly melodramatic and that there was no point, if you lived in New York, attempting suicide from the top of a six-story building.
I did not want to sit on the roof, though I was also aware that if I didn’t allow myself the relief of considering suicide, I would soon explode from within and commit suicide. I felt the fatal tentacles of this despair wrapping themselves around my arms and legs. Soon they would hold the fingers I would need to take the right pills or to pull the trigger, and when I had died, they would be the only motion left. I knew that the voice of reason (“For heaven’s sake, just go downstairs!”) was the voice of reason, but I also knew that by reason I would deny all the poison within me, and I felt already some strange despairing ecstasy at the thought of the end. If only I had been disposable like yesterday’s paper! I would have thrown myself away so quietly then and been glad of the absence, glad in the grave if that was the only place that could allow some gladness.
My own awareness that depression is maudlin and laughable helped to get me off the roof. So did the thought of my father, who had tried so hard for me. I could not bring myself to believe in any love enough to imagine that the loss of me would be noticed, but I knew how sad it would be for him to have worked so hard at saving me and not to have succeeded. And I kept thinking about cutting up lamb chops for him someday, and I knew I had promised to do that, and I had always taken pride in breaking no promises, and my father had never broken a promise to me, and that, finally, was what led me downstairs. At about six in the morning, drenched with sweat and the remains of the dew and developing what would soon turn into a raging fever, I went back to my apartment. I didn’t particularly want to die but I also didn’t at all want to live.
The things that save you are as frequently trivial as monumental. One, certainly, is a sense of privacy; to kill yourself is to open your life’s misery up to the world. A famous, astonishingly good-looking, brilliant, happily married man, posters of whom bedecked the walls of girls I knew in high school, told me that he had gone through a severe depression in his late twenties and had considered suicide quite seriously. “Only my vanity saved me,” he said, quite in earnest. “I couldn’t stand the idea of people afterwards saying that I couldn’t succeed, or that I couldn’t deal with success, or laughing at me.” Famous and successful people seem particularly likely to suffer depression. Since the world is flawed, perfectionists tend to be depressed. Depression lowers self-esteem, but in many personalities, it does not eliminate pride, which is as good an engine for the fight as any I know. When you’re so far down that love seems almost meaningless, vanity and a sense of obligation can save your life.
It was not until two days after the rooftop episode that I called back my old friend, who laid into me for waking her up and then disappearing. As she scolded, I felt the overpowering weirdness of the life I was living, which I knew I could not possibly explain. Dizzy with the fever and with terror, I said nothing. She never really spoke to me again. I would describe her as someone who cherished normality, and I had become much too peculiar. Depression is hard on friends. You make what by the standards of the world are unreasonable demands on them, and often they don’t have the resilience or the flexibility or the knowledge or the inclination to cope. If you’re lucky some people will surprise you with their adaptability. You communicate what you can and hope. Slowly, I’ve learned to take people for who they are. Some friends can process a severe depression right up front, and some can’t. Most people don’t like one another’s unhappiness very much. Few can cope with the idea of a depression divorced from external reality; many would prefer to think that if you’re suffering, it’s with reason and subject to logical resolution.
A large proportion of my best friends are a little bit crazy. People have taken my frankness as an invitation to be frank themselves, and I have many friends with whom I have found a trust like that between schoolmates or former lovers, the ease of a vast mutual knowing. I try to be cautious with my friends who are too sane. Depression is itself destructive, and it breeds destructive impulses: I am easily disappointed in people who don’t get it and sometimes make the mistake of telling off those who have frustrated me. After any given depression, there’s the need for a lot of cleanup. I remember that I love friends I had thought of letting go. I try to rebuild what I have wasted. After any given depression comes the time to uncrack the eggs and to put the spilled milk back in the container.
In the spring of 1995, the late phase of my analysis was dragging on. My analyst was retiring gradually, and though I had not wanted to lose her, I found the bit-by-bit process agonizing, like ripping off scabs slowly. It was my mother’s prolonged demise all over again. I finally ended it myself, walking in one day with a sudden burst of clarity and announcing that I would not be coming back.
In psychoanalysis, I had studied my own past in detail. I have since decided that my mother was also depressive. I can remember her once describing the sense of desolation she had felt as an only child. She was irritable as an adult. She used pragmatism as a force field permanently to shield her against uncontrolled sadness. It was, at best, only partially effective. I believe that she kept herself from ever experiencing a breakdown by regimenting and regulating her life; she was a woman of remarkable self-discipline. I believe now that her blessed rage for order was ordained by the pain she so fastidiously relegated to a place just below the surface. I ache for the pain she endured, which I mostly don’t have to endure—what would her life, our lives, indeed, have been like if Prozac had existed when I was a child? I’d love to see better treatments with fewer side effects, but I am so grateful to live in this age of solutions rather than that age of ignorant struggle. So much of my mother’s wisdom about how to live with one’s difficulties turned out to be unnecessary for me, and if she had only lived a little bit longer, it would have been unnecessary for her. It seems poignant in retrospect. I have wondered, so often, what she would have said about my depressions, whether she would have recognized anything in them, whether we would have been drawn together in my collapse—but since it was her death that at least in part occasioned that collapse, I will never know. I didn’t have the questions to ask until I had lost the person of whom I would have liked to ask them. Nonetheless, I had in my mother a model of someone in whom a certain sadness was always present.
When I stopped taking the drugs, I did it fast. I knew that this was dumb, but I just wanted desperately to be off medication. I thought I might be able to find out who I was again. It was not a good strategy. In the first place, I had never experienced anything like the withdrawal symptoms from the Xanax: I could not sleep properly, and I felt anxious and strangely tentative. I also felt the whole time as though I’d had several gallons of cheap cognac the night before. My eyes hurt and I had an upset stomach, which probably came from quitting the Paxil cold turkey. At night, when I was not really asleep, I had unrelenting terrifying nightmares, and I woke up with my heart pounding. The psychopharmacologist had told me over and over again that when I was ready to go off the drugs, I should do it gradually and under his supervision, but my determination had been sudden and I was afraid of losing it.
I felt a little bit like my old self, but the year had been so awful, had shaken me so deeply, that though I was now functioning again, I had also realized that I could not go on. This did not feel irrational, li
ke the terror; it did not feel angry; it felt quite sensible. I had had enough of life, and I wanted to figure out how to end it with the least possible damage to the people around me. I needed something I believed in, something to show, so that everyone would understand how desperate I was. I had to give up the invisible impediment for a manifest one. There is little question in my mind that the particular behavior I chose was highly individual and related to neuroses of my own, but the decision to behave with such a hunger to be rid of the self was typical of agitated depression. All I had to do was to get sick, and that would give me permission. The wish for a more visible illness was, I would later learn, a commonplace among depressives, who often engage in forms of self-mutilation to bring the physical state in line with the mental. I knew that my suicide would be devastating for my family and sad for my friends, but I felt they would all understand that I had had no choice.
I could not figure out how to give myself cancer or MS or various other fatal diseases, but I knew just how to get AIDS, so I decided to do that. In a park in London, at a lonely hour well after midnight, a short, tubby man with thick tortoiseshell eyeglasses came up and offered himself to me. He pulled down his trousers and bent over. I went to work. I felt as though this were all happening to someone else; I heard his glasses fall off, and I thought only this: soon I will be dead, and so I will never become old and sad like this man. A voice in my head said that I had finally started this process and would soon die, and at the thought I felt such a sense of release and of gratitude. I tried to understand why this man had gone on living, why he got up and did things all day in order to come here at night. There was a half moon and it was springtime.
It was not my intention to die slowly of AIDS; it was my intention to kill myself with HIV as my excuse. At home, I had a burst of fear and called a good friend and told him what I had done. He talked me through it and I went to bed. When I woke up in the morning, I felt much as I had felt on the first day of college or summer camp or a new job. This was to be the next phase of my life. Having eaten of the forbidden fruit, I decided to make applesauce. The end was at hand. I had a new sense of efficiency. That depression of purposelessness was gone. Over the next three months, I sought out other such experiences with strangers whom I assumed to be infected, taking ever greater and more direct risks. I was sorry that I could not seem to have any pleasure from these sexual encounters, but I was too preoccupied with my agenda to be jealous of those who did. I never got the names of these people, never went home with them or invited them home with me. I went once a week, often on Wednesdays, to a local spot where I could have an economical experience that would infect me.
In the meanwhile, I went through boringly typical symptoms of agitated depression. I had had anxiety, which is sheer terror; this was much more full of hatred, anguish, guilt, self-loathing. I have never in my life felt so temporary. I slept badly, and I was ferociously irritable. I stopped speaking to at least six people, including one with whom I had thought I might be in love. I took to slamming down the phone when someone said something I didn’t like. I criticized everyone. It was hard to sleep because my mind was racing with tiny injustices from my past, which now seemed unforgivable. I could not really concentrate on anything: I am usually a voracious summer reader, but that summer I couldn’t make it through a magazine. I started doing my laundry every night while I was awake, to keep busy and distracted. When I got a mosquito bite, I picked at it until it bled, then picked off the scabs; I bit my nails so far down that my fingers were always bleeding too; I had open wounds and scratches everywhere, though I never actually cut myself. My situation was so different from the vegetative symptoms that had constituted my breakdown that it did not occur to me that I was still in the grip of the same illness as before.
Then one day in early October, after one of my bouts of unpleasant unsafe sex, this one with a boy who had followed me to a hotel and made a beseeching move on the elevator, I realized that I might be infecting others—and that was not my agenda. I was suddenly terrified that I had given someone else the disease; I had wanted to kill myself, but not the rest of the world. I’d had four months to get infected; I’d had a total of about fifteen unsafe episodes; and it was time to stop before I began to spread disease everywhere. The knowledge that I would die had also lifted the depression I’d felt and had even in a strange way diminished the wish to die. I put that period of my life behind me. I became gentler again. At my thirty-second birthday, I looked around at the many friends who had come for my party, and I was able to smile, knowing that this was the last one, that I would never have a birthday again, that I would soon die. The celebrations were tiring; the gifts I left in their paper wrapping. I calculated how long I would have to wait. I wrote a note to myself of the date in March when six months would have elapsed from the last encounter, when I could get my test, my confirmation. And all the while, I acted fine.
I worked productively on some writing projects, organized both family Thanksgiving and Christmas, and was sentimental about my last holidays. Then a few weeks after New Year’s, I reviewed the details of my encounters with a friend who was an expert on HIV, and he told me that I might well be fine. At first I was dismayed, but then the period of my agitated depression, whatever had driven me to that behavior, began to lift. I do not think that the HIV experiences were expiatory; time had just passed, curing the ill thinking that had driven me to such excess in the first place. Depression, which comes at you with the gale force of a breakdown, leaves gradually, quietly. My first breakdown was over.
The insistence on normality, the belief in an inner logic in the face of unmistakable abnormality, is endemic to depression. It is the everyman story of this book, one I have encountered time after time. The shape of each person’s normality, however, is unique: normality is perhaps an even more private idea than weirdness. Bill Stein, a publisher I know, comes from a family in which both depression and trauma have run high. His father, born a Jew in Germany, left Bavaria on a business visa in early 1938. His grandparents were lined up outside the family house on Kristallnacht, in November of 1938, and though they were not arrested, they had to watch as many of their friends and neighbors were sent off to Dachau. The trauma of being a Jew in Nazi Germany was horrendous, and Bill’s grandmother went into a six-week decline after Kristallnacht, which culminated with her suicide on Christmas Day. The following week, exit visas arrived for both Bill’s grandparents. His father emigrated alone.
Bill’s parents married in Stockholm in 1939 and moved to Brazil before settling in the United States. His father always refused to discuss this history; “that period in Germany,” Bill recalls, “simply did not exist.” They lived on an attractive street in a prosperous suburb in a bubble of unreality. In part perhaps because of his practice of denial, Bill’s father suffered a severe breakdown at the age of fifty-seven and had repeated lapses straight through to his death more than thirty years later. His depressions followed the same patterns that his son would inherit. His first major breakdown occurred when his son was five years old; he continued to go to pieces periodically, with a particularly deep depression that lasted from the time Bill was in sixth grade until the time he finished junior high school.
Bill’s mother came from a much wealthier and more privileged German Jewish family that had left Germany for Stockholm in 1919. A woman of strong character, she once slapped a Nazi captain in the face for being rude to her; “I’m a Swedish citizen,” she told him, “and I won’t be spoken to in that way.”
By the age of nine, Bill Stein was experiencing lengthy periods of depression. For about two years, he was terrified of going to sleep and was traumatized when his parents went to bed. Then his dark feelings lifted for a few years. After some minor lapses, they returned when he got to college, spinning out of control in 1974, during the second term of his freshman year. “I had this sadistic roommate, and the academic pressure was intense. I was so anxious I was hyperventilating,” he recalls. “I just couldn’t take the pr
essure. So I went to the undergraduate health services and they gave me Valium.”
The depression did not lift during the summer. “Often when I had deep depressions, the control of my bowels would go. I remember that summer was particularly severe in this way. I was dreading sophomore year. I couldn’t face my exams or anything. When I got back to school and went through my first year and got straight As, I honestly thought someone had made a mistake. When it turned out that they hadn’t, it gave me something of a high, and that pulled me out of the depression.” If there are triggers for breakdowns, there are also triggers for turning around, and that was Stein’s. “I came back down to normal again a day later, but I never truly sank again at school. I did, however, withdraw from my aspirations. If you had told me then what I would be doing now, the people I would be working with, I’d have been utterly shocked. I was ambitionless.” Despite this acceptance of his lot, Stein worked slavishly hard. He continued to get straight As. “I don’t know why I bothered,” he says. “I didn’t want to go to law school or anything. I just thought that somehow good grades would make me safe, would convince me that I was functional.” When he graduated, Stein took a job teaching in a public high school in upstate New York. It was a disaster; he couldn’t discipline a class and he lasted only one year. “I left a failure. I lost a lot of weight. I had another depression. And then the father of a friend said he could get me a job, and I took it to have something to do.”
Bill Stein is a man of quiet, powerful intelligence and an entirely restrained ego. He is self-effacing almost to a fault. Bill suffered repeated depressions, each about six months long, somewhat seasonal, usually hitting a low point in April. The worst came in 1986, precipitated by turbulence at work, the loss of a good friend, and Bill’s attempt to get off Xanax, which he had taken for just a month but to which he had become addicted. “I lost my apartment,” Stein says. “I lost my job. I lost most of my friends. I couldn’t stay in a house by myself. I was supposed to be moving from my old apartment I’d just sold to this new apartment that was being renovated, and I just couldn’t. I crashed so quickly and the anxiety devastated me. I would wake up at three or four in the morning with these sort of rushes of anxiety that were so intense it would have been more pleasurable to jump out the window. When I was with other people, I always felt like I was going to faint from the stress. I’d been whizzing around the globe to Australia, fine, three months earlier, and now the world had been taken away from me. I was in New Orleans when it really hit and I suddenly knew I had to get home, but I couldn’t board a plane. People took advantage of me; I was a wounded animal in an open meadow.” He broke down completely. “When you’re really bad, you have this sort of catatonic look on your face, as if you’ve been stunned. You act strangely because of your deficits; my short-term memory disappeared. And then it got even worse. I couldn’t control my bowels and I would make in my pants. Then I was living in such terror of that that I couldn’t leave my own apartment, and that was a further trauma. In the end, I moved back to my parents’ house.” But life at home was not ameliorative. Bill’s father crumpled under the pressure of his son’s illness and ended up in the hospital himself. Bill went to stay with his sister; then a school friend took him in for seven weeks. “It was horrendous,” he says. “I thought, at that point, that I would be mentally ill for the rest of my life. The episode lasted for more than a year. It seemed better to float with the down than to fight it. I think you have to let go and understand that the world will be re-created and may never again resemble what you knew previously.”
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